What about the Stacey case? There seems to be a stark difference between his actions and those of Malema, in that Stacey did not seem to be trying to spread an idea or influence others to carry out any action themselves. We may, following Yong, describe Stacey’s hate speech as ‘targeted vilification’1 as he was directly addressing those he was stigmatising on the basis of their race. Unlike in the Malema case, it does not seem as though there is any clear case of incitement. Rather, his words were hurtful or offensive to both those he was abusing, and other onlookers. His conviction was for a “racially-aggravated public order offence”, but since his comments were directed at only a small number of people (and only became widely-seen as a result of those offended by it reproducing his remarks) it does not seem that, aside from merely causing offence, his remarks caused any indirect harm.
I’ve recently changed my mind over some important questions after encountering some new arguments. This is a good thing – we should always be willing to alter our opinions in proportion to the evidence. In this post, I will attempt to circumvent the intellect and appeal to your sense of conscience, to convince you of the new things I’ve learned.
In short excerpt an interview published yesterday, Michael Shermer claims that science can somehow weigh in on issues of morality. I disagree – science has nothing at all to say about morality.
As of yesterday, I’m 30 years old. In my 31st year I plan on posting a bit more about…
The following is a guest post by Claus Larsen, editor of skepticreport.com. Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the…
In the chapter following his famous defence, Mill does in fact suggest that there may be some limit to expression:
“An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled by the unfavourable sentiments, and, when needful, by the active interference of mankind.”1
This has been seen to be a concession that if the expression of an opinion acts as an incitement to cause harm to others, then it should be restricted. The handing out of a placard may be restricted as it causes harm to others indirectly, in the same way as does a plot to cause death or destruction. It is not the expression of an opinion, but a deliberate attempt to cause harm to another that is the reason for the restriction. Jacobson has noted that this does not prohibit all harm, but only the harm done “specifically to those interests of others that ought to be considered as rights” (2000 pp. 309). The claim by those who believe that hate speech should be restricted is usually that hate speech causes indirect harm and thus, under Mill’s harm principle it is justifiable or desirable to restrict this kind of expression.
CRT’s illiberalism is unpalatable, and it appears to be rather dogmatic. Any critique is just a symptom of privilege-blindness made only by those who “don’t get it” betraying their biases. “Listen to the [minority]!”, we are told, as if the voices of all members of that minority are in perfect synchronisation with each other. What is really meant by this is that we should listen only to those who agree with CRT (and similar belief systems), and whatever we are told by them we should accept without question (including normative statements and moral pronouncements which require philosophical inquiry in addition to the empirical data we are too biased to observe for ourselves).
Russell Blackford on The Hellfire Club has drawn our attention to calls for a professor of bioethics to resign on account of his views on screening for Down syndrome in the womb.
Russell’s main claim in his post is a fairly weak one – whatever your views on this, we should not call for the resignation of academics because of their professional opinions, especially when those opinions are considered respectable by their peers. I agree with that wholeheartedly, but I wanted to offer some of my own (poorly-researched) thoughts on this rather sensitive issue.
Justin Vacula has written about blame and intent in a recent post titled “Blame and Intent”. His purpose is primarily to argue against the claim that “intent is not magic”, the meaning of which is, according to him:
that the feelings and beliefs of a person who is a recipient of a message, rather than the intent of the individual, takes priority.
I gave this phrase a quick google (as I don’t recall ever seeing it in any philosophical literature) and it appears to have it’s origin in 2010 in post called “Intent! It’s Fucking Magic!” on a blog called “Genderbitch: Musings of a Trans Chick”. As fascinating as the blog sounds, rather than argue specifically against it I’ll use it to spark some thoughts about the role of intent in meaning, and argue that while intent is not magic (and as far as I can tell, nobody is claiming that it is), at least according to one plausible theory it is an important part of the analysis of meaning.
Having laid out what I consider to be a strong defence of freedom of expression, I must now consider the most common challenge to it: hate speech. In order to make the best case for hate speech legislation, we must first decide upon a working definition of what hate speech is. This definition will be imperfect in that it will not necessarily succeed in drawing a sharp boundary between exactly what is or is not rightly called ‘hate speech’. However, we are considering only whether or not there is some hate speech that should be restricted (as opposed to all), and so this is not a particularly important issue for my purposes.